Charles Davis (via Jon
Schwarz) has an incisive take on the high fluttery
flail induced in our imperial courtiers by the latest Tea Party
tantrums. Davis demolishes a piece in The Nation by progressive paladin
Maria Harris-Lacewell, in which she waxes lyrical -- not to say nonsensical
-- about the great threat to "the legitimacy of the state" posed by Tea
Partiers disrespecting our elected officials. These acts -- spitting,
swearing, insulting, shouting, etc. -- which might have been considered
legitimate expressions of citizen anger (or at least good clean fun) if
directed at, say, George Dubya or Dick Nixon, are now to be regarded as
-- I kid you not -- "an act of sedition" when aimed at the ruling party.

It's this kind of thing that gives insipid sycophancy a bad name.
But Davis is on the case:

Now, considering that U.S. government
imprisons more of its own citizens than any other in the history, with
25 percent of the world's prisoners; that it has more military bases in
more countries than any previous empire in history, and has killed
millions of people from Iraq to Vietnam; and that its current head,
Barack Obama, is openly targeting for extrajudicial killing Americans
and foreigners alike, one might ask: why is a liberal magazine so
concerned about this state's legitimacy?

Or as Thoreau put it (in a quote that is pretty much the slogan for this
blog): "How does it become a man to behave toward this American
government to-day? I answer that he cannot without disgrace be
associated with it."

Davis is right to draw attention to Obama's astonishingly brazen
claim of arbitrary power over the life and death of every person in the
world, including American citizens. This is perhaps his most atrocious
act of "continuity" with his despised and criminal predecessor. But
unlike Bush, Obama has not been hugger-mugger about this assertion of
world-engulfing authoritarianism, dribbling it out piecemeal in nods and
winks, secret directives, cunning leaks and oblique references. No, he sent his National Intelligence Director,
Dennis Blair, to proclaim the president's universal license to kill in
open testimony before Congress.

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Just a few weeks ago, the intelligence
poo-bah told the House Intelligence Committee (my, my, so much
"Intelligence" around town these days, and so few brains) that Americans
(and everyone else) could be killed -- without charge, arrest, trial or
defense -- by the U.S. government if said government decides --
secretly, of course -- that the target poses "a threat" of some kind.
This assertion of arbitrary power beyond the dreams of even the maddest
Roman emperor was greeted with absolute silence by the great and good of
the constitutional American republic. No thunderous editorials, no
outraged demonstrations -- just nods of acquiescence and indifference.

(Odd that the Tea Partiers -- so het up about encroachments on their
liberty -- don't spit about this kind of thing. But then again, a good
many of them crave strong-man rule, a tough guy who will 'do what it
takes' without fussing about a bunch of namby-pamby rules. They just
don't like one of those darkies wielding it.)

But as Davis notes, whatever small, or nascent, or possibly
potential threat that the frothier fringe of marginal militants might
pose, it is the gargantuan crimes now being committed by our militarist
state that we should fear, and resist:

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[C]olor me unimpressed with the
argument that I have more to fear from the talk radio right than I do
the incarcerating-and-assassinating state. ... In addition to the
hundreds killed without so much as a show trial by hellfire missiles
since the glorious advent of The Liberal Ascendancy, agents of the U.S.
government have been implicated in several headline-grabbing atrocities,
the latest of which involved the pre-dawn slaying of a pair of pregnant
women and a teenage girl. That female civilians are being killed at a
level on par with Afghan males is no doubt being hailed in the halls of
Brookings as a feminist triumph, but it's more troubling to me than the
idea of some people questioning the legitimacy of the perpetrators'
employer.

Perhaps they shouldn't just be ignored, but
until Glenn Beck's followers kill two dozen people in a remote village,
I'm going to spend most of my time focusing on those with control over
the tanks and nuclear weapons. And rather than seeking to bolster the
state and reinforce the idea of some mythical, mystical social contract,
I just might seek to undermine this government, so far as I can, for as
long as it continues enriching a politically connected corporate elite
while imprisoning and enlisting the rest of its population, no matter
how "duly elected" our politicians might be as a result of the sham
two-party electoral system. When political leaders are engaged in
senseless war and widespread human rights abuses -- and the occupation
of Afghanistan and the U.S. prison system at home and abroad qualify --
the person of conscience's duty is not to the state but to justice,
which usually means opposing the state and questioning its presumed
legitimacy.

But you can be sure that most of our conscience-laden progressives will
be more upset about Obama's move to open up vast tracts of coastal waters to
oil drilling than his intensification of the wars of dominion on the
imperial frontiers. (Obama's oil caper is yet another example where he
is treading farther rightward than even Dubya dared to go. But Arthur
Silber, among others, nailed this long ago, back during the
campaign: Obama's more presentable persona will allow him to entrench
and expand the militarist-corporatist system far more effectively than
any bumbling, bellicose right-winger could.)

One should never dismiss the "yearning for
fascism" that is abroad in the country, of course, a fell and growing
mood that Chris Hedges describes so well here.
Hedges also locates one of the root causes of this yearning: the
complete and utter collapse of the 'left' (using that term very broadly
to mean alternatives to the militarist-corporatist imperial system), and
its eager co-option by one of the principal pillars of that system: the
Democratic Party. As Hedges notes:

The Democrats and their liberal
apologists are so oblivious to the profound personal and economic
despair sweeping through this country that they think offering
unemployed people the right to keep their unemployed children on their
nonexistent health care policies is a step forward. They think that
passing a jobs bill that will give tax credits to corporations is a
rational response to an unemployment rate that is, in real terms, close
to 20 percent. They think that making ordinary Americans, one in eight
of whom depends on food stamps to eat, fork over trillions in taxpayer
dollars to pay for the crimes of Wall Street and war is acceptable. They
think that the refusal to save the estimated 2.4 million people who
will be forced out of their homes by foreclosure this year is justified
by the bloodless language of fiscal austerity. The message is clear.
Laws do not apply to the power elite. Our government does not work. And
the longer we stand by and do nothing, the longer we refuse to embrace
and recognize the legitimate rage of the working class, the faster we
will see our anemic democracy die ... If we do not embrace this outrage
and distrust as our own it will be expressed through a terrifying
right-wing backlash.

But to head off this backlash, we must focus on the system that is producing
this miasma of chaos, anger, anxiety and hate -- a system that is
teaching its people, by example, that violence, force and lawlessness
are glorious and worthy, are, in fact, legitimate. Hedges quotes Cynthia
McKinney on this point:

I am a child of the South. Janet
Napolitano tells me I need to be afraid of people who are labeled white
supremacists but I was raised around white supremacists. I am not afraid
of white supremacists. I am concerned about my own government. The
Patriot Act did not come from the white supremacists, it came from the
White House and Congress. Citizens United did not come from white
supremacists, it came from the Supreme Court.

The War Machine -- and the Democrats' avid fealty to it -- is at the
corroded heart of the matter. But this love of war (as long as it is
visited on other people, far away) is not confined to the ruling elite
alone. And this is one reason why even if the inchoate anger expressed
by Tea Partiers and others could be harnessed and directed at its proper
targets (many of whom, of course, are happily stoking this misdirected
rage to keep it away from their own golden nest eggs), it would still
fall short of transforming the system. Yes, you could, for example, put
our crooked banksters on trial for fraud; but if they were simply
replaced by new bankers who, even with heavier regulations and
restrictions, still financed the War Machine, then the same corrupting
cycle of blood money and bellicosity would rage on unabated. Until
Americans drop their addiction to war -- which is inextricably bound up
with the widespread, bipartisan cult of exceptionalism -- there will be
no stability, no security, no peace, no prosperity for ordinary people,
neither at home or abroad. As I noted here last year:

This is the system we have. It's right
out in the open. There is a deep-rooted expectation and not, alas,
just among the elite -- that the world should jump to America's tune, by
force if necessary. And when, for whatever reason, some part of the
world does not jump or bump and grind to the Potomac beat, then it
becomes a "problem" that must be "solved," by one means or another,
with, of course, "all options on the table," all the time. And whether
these "problems" are approached with blunt, bullying talk or a degree of
cajolery and pious rhetoric, the chosen stance is always backed up with
the ever-present threat of military action, up to and including the
last of those "options" that always decorate the table: utter
annihilation.

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This is not even questioned, must less debated
or challenged. America's right to intervene in the affairs other nations
by violent force (along with a constant series of illegal covert
activities) and to impose an empire of military plantations across the
length and breadth of the entire planet is the basic assumption, the
underlying principle, the fervently held faith shared by both national
parties, and the entire elite Establishment. And if you want to have the
necessary instruments to maintain such a state of hegemony, then you
must indeed structure your society and economy around war.

Many nations all vanished now have done
this. The Roman Empire was one. Nazi Germany was another. At great cost
to the economic, social and political life of ordinary Germans, Adolf
Hitler geared the state to produce the war machine necessary to assert
the dominance in world affairs which he felt was Germany's natural
right. One of his chief aims was to procure enough "living space" and
natural resources in Eastern Europe to compete with America's growing
economic might. The Holocaust of European Jews was, for all its horror,
just a preliminary to the greater "ethnic cleansing" to come. As
historian Adam Tooze reminds us in The Wages of Destruction, the Nazis
had drawn up detailed plans for the extermination by active mass
murder and deliberate starvation of up to 40 million East Europeans.

Today, we all recognize the inhuman madness
behind this hegemonic ambition. We shake our heads and say, "Whatever
evils we may be accused of, we have never and would never do such a
thing." Perhaps. But leaving aside for a moment the millions millions
of African slaves and Native Americans who died in order to procure the
living space and natural resources of North and South America for
European peoples, it is clear that most Americans the elite above all
can easily countenance the deaths of, say, more than one million
innocent Iraqis, or upwards of three million Southeast Asians, without
any disturbance in their sense of national righteousness, their bedrock
belief that the United States has the natural right, even the duty, to
assert its hegemony over world affairs.

Unless there is some profound shift in American consciousness, of the
sort that Martin Luther King Jr. was trying to effect in his last years,
all of this will continue -- even if we have genuine health care
reform, genuine rescue of those ravaged by our financial sharks, genuine
environmental protection, and so on.

Chris Floyd is an American journalist. His work has appeared in print and online in venues all over the world, including The Nation, Counterpunch, Columbia Journalism Review, the Christian Science Monitor, Il Manifesto, the Moscow Times and many (more...)